Description
(formerly Leucojum trichophyllum)
This Iberian and N. African plant remains very little seen in cultivation. It is, in my experience, one of the very few plants where the British obsession with lime or acid soils actually has some relevance to cultivation. I have consistently found that it does better in an acid soil. This is borne out in the wild, across Portugal where I have seen it forming very extensive colonies over acid sands but it is only very rarely found over limestone and then only in what seems a depauperate form compared to the lush plants in acid sands. In Spain I have seen it only in acid, sandy soils.
This isn’t a plant for the open garden in the UK, it dislikes too much water and it does need a very well-drained soil. In the UK it does well in a pot of very sandy loam (actually what I use is closer to a loamy sand)! It flowers in early spring with very narrow grassy leaves and spikes of 2-3 flowers of crystalline white in from late March well into April. The flowers normally have a pink tinge at the ovary end but in this strain the plants are largely white-flowered, the stock does however contain a range of infusions with both pink-tinged plants (and even a few palest pink-flowered specimens). The picture is typical of most plants in this stock.
Acis trichophylla does make vegetative increase, but unlike most bulbs and all other Acis, these are not offsets made by bulb splitting but true bulbils, produced at the top of the old bulb when these get larger, in the manner of an underground Pleione; I have added a picture of this in our gallery. The stock grown here is a mixture of vegetative and seed-raised, white-flowered plants, originally found in shallow, clayey sand in bare fire-break areas at the edge of Pine woods, near Cape Trafalgar in Southern Spain.
New to our lists April 2020
